Agriculture, climate change and nature in Africa

[Extract] When I began working in Africa in the late 1960s the continent had a population of about 250 million. Since then the population has quadrupled and there are now over a billion Africans. During the intervening years agricultural yields per capita and per hectare stagnated and in many cases declined although the past ten years have seen promising signs of progress and the economies of the continent are now growing at around 3% per annum. Nonetheless the continent has the highest proportion of food insecure people of any region of the world (FAO 2010); the population is set to double again within a couple of decades and hundreds of millions of people still live from subsistence agriculture on farms that average two hectares but which are often much smaller. The challenge of feeding this growing population has to be met in a context of great uncertainty about future climates and without destroying the environment upon which all agriculture ultimately depends